The Parallels of Islam and Judaism in Diaspora

Two moments in modern history: A religious community is banned from
wearing distinctive clothing in public schools as doing so is seen as
a violation of the rules of secular society, while another religious
community is forbidden from ritually slaughtering animals as such
slaughter is seen as a cruel and unnatural act. These prohibitions
take place more than 100 years apart, the former recently in France,
the latter more than a century ago in Switzerland.

What are the religious communities in question? In France the order
banning ostentatious religious clothing and ornaments in schools and
other public institutions affects the evident target group, Muslim
women, as well as religious Jewish men and women who cover their
heads. In Switzerland the prohibition against kosher Jewish slaughter
(which still stands today) also covers the slaughter of animals by
Muslims who follow the ritual to make halal meat. These different
prohibitions have affected Jews and Muslims in oddly similar ways, yet
each group has responded in different ways to its confrontation with
the secular modern world. Those responses can tell us much about the
flexibility and intransigence of both religious communities and the
worlds in which they live.

Scratch secular Europe today, and you will find long-held Christian
presuppositions and attitudes toward Jews and Muslims present in
subliminal or overt forms. Recently German, Italian, Polish, and
Slovakian delegates demanded that the Christian heritage of the
new Europe be writ large in the European constitution. It was only the
post-September 11 anxiety of most states that enabled Valéry Giscard
d'Estaing, as president of the convention writing the
constitution, to persuade the group that such a reference would be
inappropriate. The demand was transformed into a reference in
the preamble to the cultural, religious, and humanist inheritance
of Europe. No one missed what was meant.

What continues to trouble Europeans about Judaism and Islam is their
all-too-close relationship to Christianity. It is the seeming
similarity of the three Abrahamic (the new buzzword including
Islam in the Judeo-Christian fold) religions that draws attention to
the real or imagined differences among them—what Sigmund Freud
called the narcissism of minor differences. Those differences
are heightened in a secular society that is rooted in the mind-set
(and often the attitudes, beliefs, social mores, and civic practices)
of the majority religious community—that is to say,
Christianity.

Minority religions in a secular society that still has religious
overtones are promised a wide range of civil rights—including
those of freedom of religion—if only its members adhere to the
standards of civilized behavior as defined by the secular society (and
rooted in the desire to make sure that society, with its masked
religious assumptions, redefines the minority's religious
practice). Thus Muslims and Jews have the same rights to public
schooling as Christians, if only they don't insist on wearing head
scarves or coverings. Any differences between majority and minority
religions seem threatening because the majority religion has already
ceded so much ground to overt secularization. Over and over, the
integration of Jews in the 18th and 19th centuries was decried as a
force of modernization, rather than as the result of
modernization. Today Islam is accused of being a threat to the
modernization Europe wants, but it also highlights the loss of
religious identity that Europeans know comes with modernization.

The West needs to understand these dynamics of change. If we assume
that transformation occurs (or does not occur) only within communities
that are seen as different, we miss the dynamic change that occurs in
society as a whole. Religious experience is an aspect of all
societies—even those that label themselves as anti-religion. In
tracking how religious ritual and practice shift and rebound, how they
are transmuted and become a place for resistance, we can say as much
about the culture in which religion is found as about religions
themselves.

A new project I am beginning will look at the experiences among Jews
from the late-18th century (which marked the beginning of civil
emancipation) to the beginning of the 20th century—and will ask
how those experiences parallel the experiences now confronting
diaspora Islam in secular Western Europe. The similarities are
striking: A religious minority enters a self-described secular (or
secularizing) society that is Christian in its rhetoric and
presuppositions and that perceives a special relationship with
that minority. (That special relationship is marked for Jews by the
Christian appropriation of the Old Testament and the Messianic
prophecy; for Muslims, by the appropriation of the Old Testament and
the New as part of Muslims' claims of a final prophetic
revelation.) The minority speaks a different secular language (for
Jews, it was Western and Eastern Yiddish as well as Ladino; for
Muslims, it is Turkish, Bengali, and colloquial Arabic as well as
others) but also has a different religious language (Hebrew and
classical Arabic). Religious schools that teach in the languages
associated with a religious group are seen as sources of corruption
and illness. Indeed some authorities in Germany and the Netherlands
have recently advocated that only native languages be spoken in
mosques to make the message of the sermon transparent to the greater
society. That is not far from the desire that was expressed in the
18th century that Jews learn German in order to become members of
civil society.

Religious rites are practiced by minority religions that seem an
abomination to the majority culture. Unlike the secular majority, the
minority religions practice the mutilation of children's bodies
(infant male circumcision, and, for some Muslims, infant female
genital cutting); the suppression of women's rights (lack of
women's traditional education, a secondary role in religious
practice, arranged marriages); barbaric torture of animals (the
cutting of the throats of unstunned animals, allowing them to bleed to
death); and ostentatious clothing that signals religious affiliation
and has ritual significance, among a number of other
practices. Centrally relating all of those practices for both groups
is a belief in the divine chosenness of the group in contrast
to all others.

The demonization of certain aspects of religious practice has its
roots in what civil society will tolerate and what it will not. Why it
will not tolerate something is, of course, central to the story. Thus
Alan Dundes argued decades ago that the anxiety about the implications
of cannibalism associated with the consumption of the body and blood
of Christ in the Christian Mass shaped the fantasy that Jews were
slaughtering Christian children for their blood. It was the often
unacknowledged discomfort with its own practices that influenced how
Christian society responded to the Jews. Such anxiety is also present
in the anger secular Europe directed at other Jewish rituals
associated with bloodletting, such as the ritual slaughter of
animals. The way that a minority religion's practices, which
differ from those of the majority religion, highlight the very things
that seem confusing or uncomfortable about that majority religion in a
secular society is part of the story. Thus Muslim women who wear head
scarves evoke not just the repression of Muslim women in Western
society but also Western insecurities about the role of all women in
the public sphere.

One of the most striking similarities of the process of Jewish and
Muslim integration into Western secular society is the gradual elision
of the national differences among various groups, both in terms of how
they are perceived and how they see themselves. Muslims in Western
Europe represent multiple national traditions (South Asian in Britain,
North African in France and Spain, Turkish in Germany). But so did the
Jews in Western Europe who came out of ghettos in France and the
Rhineland or the rural reaches of Bavaria and Hungary, or who moved
from those parts of Eastern Europe— Poland, the eastern marches
of the Austro-Hungarian empire—that became part of the West. To
those one can add the Sephardi Jews from the Iberian Peninsula who
settled in areas from Britain (introducing fish and chips) to the
fringes of the Austrian empire. The standard image of the Jews in
18th-century British caricature was the Maltese Jew in his oriental
turban. By the 19th century it was that of Lord Rothschild in formal
wear at his daughter's wedding, receiving the Prince of Wales in a
London synagogue. In the intervening years the religious identity of
Jews in European eyes had become more important than national
identity—few (except the anti-Semites) remembered that the
Rothschilds were a Frankfurt family that had escaped the
Yiddish-speaking ghetto. The Jews are everywhere and all alike;
Muslims today seem to be everywhere and are becoming all alike.
How does such a shift in identity affect religious practice and
belief? Is there a decrease in conflicts felt among religious groups,
or is there a substitution of national identity for such conflicts?

I am also going to be looking at how Jews and Muslims adapted to
Western society, and what the comparison of the two groups might tell
us. For Jews the stories of integration took different forms across
Western Europe because there were different forms of Christianity,
different levels of tolerance, and different expectations as to the
meaning of citizenship. Different notions of secularization all
present variations on the theme, What do you have to give up to become
a true citizen? Do you merely have to give up your secular language?
Do you have to abandon the most evident and egregious practices?

I hope to understand what Jews thought possible to change in their
religious practice in the 18th and 19th century, what they
accomplished within various national states, and what they did not
accomplish. That is, what was gained and what was lost, both in terms
of the ability of living religions to transform themselves, and in the
understanding that all such transformations call forth other forms of
religious practice in response. The history of the Jews in the
European diaspora during the late-18th century called forth three
great reformers who took different approaches to those issues: Moses
Mendelssohn and the followers of the Jewish Enlightenment in Germany
who, together with their predecessors in Holland, argued for
accommodation with civil society in a secularizing world; Rabbi Elijah
ben Solomon of Vilnius, known as the Vilna Gaon, who desired to reform
traditional Orthodox Judaism to make it able to function in a Jewish
world that kept itself separate from secular society; and the first
modern Jewish mystics, the Hasidim, typified by Rabbi Yisrael Baal
Shem Tov in imperial Russia, who fought, like their contemporaries in
Berlin and Vilnius, against what they saw as the stultifying practices
and worldview of contemporary Judaism. All lived roughly
simultaneously. In their wake came radical changes in what it meant to
be a Jew in belief and practice.

Today we stand at the beginning of a mass integration of Muslims into
Western European culture. That culture prizes its secular nature, but
the very forms of the secular state range from Britain (where the
queen remains head of the church) to Germany, which is still divided
between Protestant and Catholic versions of secularism (and along the
dividing lines of the cold war). There were islands of Muslim
integration in Europe, such as in Bosnia, that have been transformed
over the past decade because of persecution and external
pressure. There are also Muslim communities, such as in the large
urban areas of France, that seem to be devolving into a permanent
underclass. But how the local pressure for rights, on one hand, and
integration, on the other, will play out in the future is unknown. The
very forms of religious practice and belief are at stake. Perhaps some
variants have already been tried with or without success among
European Jews?

Now I know that there are also vast differences between Jews in the
18th and 19th centuries and Muslims today. There are simply many more
Muslims today in Western Europe than there were Jews in the earlier
period. The Jews historically never formed more than 1 percent of the
population of any Western European nation; Muslim populations form a
considerable minority today. While there is no Western European city
with a Muslim majority, many recent news stories predict that
Marseilles or Rotterdam will be the first European city to have
one. In France today there are 600,000 Jews, while there are between 5
million and 6 million Muslims, who make up about 10 percent of the
population. In Germany, with a tiny Jewish population of under
100,000, almost 4 percent of the population is Muslim (totaling more
than 3 million people). In Britain about 2.5 percent of the total
population (1.48 million people) is Muslim.

Demographics (and birthrates) aside, there are salient differences in
the experiences of the Jews in the past and Muslims today. The Jews
had no national homeland—indeed were defined as nomads or
a pariah people. They lived only in the diaspora and seemed inherently
different from any other people in Western Europe. Most Muslims in the
West come out of a national tradition in which their homelands had
long histories disturbed but not destroyed by colonial rule. And last
but not least, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the past
century, as well as the Holocaust, which set the Jews apart from all
other religious groups as essential victims, seem to place the two
groups—at least in the consciousness of the West—in two
antagonistic camps.

Still there are key similarities. Notably religion for the Jews of
pre-Enlightenment Europe, and for much of contemporary Islam, was and
is a heritage to be maintained in the secular world of
diaspora. What can or must such memory of ritual and practice abandon?
What must it preserve to maintain its coherence for the group? One of
the continuing questions in regard to religious practices has to do
with ritual slaughter of animals, a practice that still links Jews and
Muslims in contemporary thought. For Muslims an alternative to the
tradition of sacrificing a ram on Eid al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice)
has been created on a Web site where one can sacrifice virtual
rams. That is a direct response to charges of inhumanness
lodged against Islamic religious practices both within and without the
Muslim community. Can that be a further sign of alternative practices
developing within Islam?

I want to examine what the solutions were to similar problems raised
by modern Western secular society in regard to Jewish religious
practice; how the Jews responded; how these responses were accepted or
rejected based on local contexts; and how the Jews became or did not
become citizens in the eyes of their non-Jewish contemporaries. Such
questions are echoed in the debates within Islamic groups today
concerning everything from the meaning of jihad to the ritual
preparation of food. Can common experiences provide a natural alliance
between Jews and Muslims?

The central cultural problem of Europe today is not how different
national cultures will be integrated into a European Union, but how
secular society will interact with European Muslims. Anyone
interested in contemporary Europe before September 11, 2001, knew that
the 800-pound gorilla confronting France, Germany, and Britain, and to
a lesser extent Spain and Italy, was the huge presence of an
unassimilatable minority. Much attention has been given
recently to the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, and
his pronouncements about the dangers of Hispanic immigrants rejecting
American values. Such fears are already being voiced in Europe about
Muslims. But exactly the same things were said about the Jews for 200
years. What does that tell us? I am only beginning to seek answers to
that question, but I hope they will help us understand the debates
that Western Europe is increasingly facing and that eventually the
United States may face, too.

Sander L. Gilman will become a professor of liberal arts and sciences
at Emory University in the fall. He is the editor, with Zhou Xun, of
Smoke: A Global History of Smoking, published last year by Reaktion
Books.